2020 Community Q&A #1

General Discussion
#1

I was forwarded these questions from the community and wanted to provide some transparency.

Yes snapshot is coming but does anyone know what is happening right now?

We don’t know. A V-Team composed of migration committee members was put together January 2nd to decide on this.

When the announcement will be?

When the V-Team is ready.

How much time will there we between snapshot and launch or between announcement and snapshot?

The V-team is also looking at this.

Yes we/they are testing, but we do not see any updates anywhere, and the promised bug fix and reboot of the testnet is nowhere to be found or info of it.

A critical bug caused a network stall on January 12th. Due to the severity, it is RC-resetting and requires a restart of testnet. A fix was committed on January 15th. The fix has not yet been deployed anywhere. In general, there needs to be a better plan for pushing both critical and non-critical updates to testnet.

Risks:

  1. Independent security audit is expected to be completed by mid February.
  2. For confidence, testnet must run without any critical issues for 2 months but preferably 3 months.
  3. There needs to be some sustained testing with 1000 nodes because there has been minimal large network testing.
  4. There should be some load testing on the public net in order to better determine minimum system requirements for a node, especially when the network is running at max TPS.

If any additional critical issues are identified, they’ll likely be RC-resetting and push out the public net release date. Non-critical issues can be fixed without requiring a testnet restart.

Thank you for your questions!

17 Likes
#2

Thank you for sharing.
Is the testnet must run 1000 nodes 2months or 3months?

To foundation.
I have questions.

  1. How many ran the test net nodes by foundation or foundation members?
  2. Community members running testnet nodes (especially Japanese members). Are you considering a bounty? If a node runs 2 or 3months, they need a server fee. A lot of people will be Thankful if you get a little help.
8 Likes
#3

I think these should have planned earlier. I feel a lack of communication between core developers and the Foundation and the Migration committee.

I’m very redard that If branding takes precedence over technology. They should understand that finding serious bugs on the mainnet through inadequate testing is more significant than branding.

6 Likes
#4

Is the testnet must run 1000 nodes 2months or 3months?

We only need to do 1000 node testing for a portion of the time. Most likely less than a month, unless a lot of problems are found.

3 Likes
#5

I think there are some interesting ways to tackle the “getting more nodes online” problem.

Option 1 - Sponsorship with a hosting provider from a NEM entity

While searching for ways to ease hosting costs on my own development networks, I came across an interesting prospect from DigitalOcean (cloud hosting provider) that could interest some of the bigger NEM entities, such as the Foundation or Ventures:

https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/#Partners,
and https://www.digitalocean.com/open-source/
or, alternatively, send an email here: opensource@digitalocean.com

What this program does is support the company in question for 12 months - in our case, it could only be a few months via DO credits for VPSs. Because Symbol is an opensource project, they would probably be way more likely to help out with getting more nodes online via some sort of sponsorship arrangment. Furthermore, DigitalOcean is super easy to setup and use for hosting Symbol nodes.

This way, we can also make it easy for the community / participating companies to host nodes reliable nodes to try to get to that 1k node mark. If a node costs very little / is free to run for testing purposes, more people would be able to run them. Incentivizing at this stage may be a bit hard to coordinate, given the amount of time we have at our disposal.

Option 2 - Referral Link

Another option could be having a referral link with DO, which would give newcomers $100 USD of DO credit for 60 days, which should be enough time to test the network with an adequate node (quad core, 8 GB RAM VPS), while at the same time providing some support to testnet node holders. For the $100, you could even host two $20 nodes for two months just using the referral credit.

For example, the NEM Foundation could have such a referral link for the community to use.

Just my two cents, I think we could make something like this work to help test a large scale network! :+1:

(sidenote: I choose DigitalOcean because they are quite reliable, relatively affordable, and work well with Symbol)

5 Likes
#6

Thank you for answering.
I think the migration committee has to create a plan to decide when 1000 nodes to test, and how to run 1000 nodes.

1 Like
#7

Feedback is always appreciated but there’s complexities behind what Jaguar is sharing. On behalf of some of teams, I’d like to share some clarifications. Sometimes Jag’s tweets or posts are vague, sometimes not. In this case, I think it’s helpful to have some more information shared for community even though there was a planned communications on this to release this Friday to community. :grimacing:

1.) The internal teams (including the various entities, Migration Committee and yes, core developers) have been diligently planning/executing for months and everything Jaguar outlined above has been discussed internally. However not all of this is public (yet) due to planning cycles.

2.) We do have a target snapshot date but it’s not been shared with the public yet. Jaguar is aware of this target date. Announcement of the snapshot date will happen when the teams are ready to announce it.

3.) We do have a timeline for when we plan to do snapshot and announcement however it has not be communicated externally because there’s a few factors around testing and rebooting the network that impact this timeline. We’ll know more in the coming weeks after the reboot. Sidenote: Pentesting has been happening and Nate (CTO) and Greg (Head of Dev for NF) have been working alongside core team every step of the way to communicate progress.

4.) 1000 nodes won’t happen all at once but rather in phases. There’s a larger communication that will come from our CTO, Nate D’Amico, on this.

5.) Someone asked about who is running a node in Foundation. Clearly not everyone in Foundation is running a node or else we’d have more than ~50 nodes. There’s a handful of team members that I know of - including myself - running nodes. Everyone in the Foundation has been encouraged to run a node and everyone on the leadership team has specifically been asked to run a node. Foundation has also reached out to partners and asked about having them support running nodes too. I suspect after the coming reboot we will see more nodes.

6.) The teams understand and have been working toward the expected 2-3 month timeframe needed for testing. Additional soak time should be expected for launch of Symbol. End of Q1 is not realistic, however May is more optimistic.

Happy to answer any additional questions the community has on this.

-Alex

7 Likes
#8

The core idea of having a bounty is good. But I don’t know that we want to become too dependent on a single host. The more distributed the nodes, the better.

3 Likes
#9

Thank you for your answer.
We are waiting for lager communication about the 1000 nodes.

Community members prepare running a lot of nodes.

3 Likes
#10

My goal is to run at least 5 nodes. I had fun setting up my first one.

Honestly, though, pre-Jag’s post the internal teams really were working on a comprehensive update for this Friday. The wait to post was because the teams were compiling a larger comms that would include updates on explorer, wallet, bootstrap tools, testnet, etc. :woman_shrugging: Jag beat us to it.

I understand community’s frustration and hope we see even more participation across internal teams and global community to run nodes so we can achieve success. (We do have external parties engaged on this too.)

6 Likes
#11

NEM ventures and NEM Foundations should launch at least 800 nodes.
NEM Ventures and NEM Foundations have money resources.

It is a financial source for that.
Thanks

#12

I don’t understand the problem to look for 1000 members and collaborators of Nem who run nodes, counting the team members, some powerful members and part of the community, this should be working already with more than 200 nodes and in the next weeks over 1000 with the Asian community.
if we already have difficulty getting 1000 testers before the launch, I don’t want to imagine the problems that will arise to be accepted globally…

3 Likes
#13

None of this information has been shared with me or the core devs.

Until this testing is completed, it should be considered a risk that more bugs will be found and testnet will need to be reset. Being proactive about such testing will help reduce the risk.

This is accurate, but it should have been announced quite a bit earlier.

I think the community would appreciate more frequent, focused updates instead of infrequent kitchen sink updates. The latter cause people to miss things and don’t really seem to be working. I’m pretty doubtful most of the community can name the Foundation’s executive team. Some didn’t even know Nate was hired as CTO :man_shrugging: .

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#14

I had to search the official website to find out who is part of the Executive Team and I am active every day at the Forum and telegram

2 Likes
#15

Please proceed carefully. This is not just NF or MC and CoreDev’s problem. Migration will affect the future and property of many people.

The most important thing now is to make a stable product.

7 Likes
#16

Thank you for eventually getting some clear answers out.
Please get this kind of information out to the bigger public more frequently. The public is not aware of what is happening!

I would suggest a setting up a stress test:

  • Star at the beginning of februari ask as much people as possible to set up a testnode
  • Provide clear information how to set up a node and set up a stress test (lots of transactions)
  • Fix an exact date and time where we can start a stress test pushing as much transactions as possible into the testnet
  • Not needed, but would be appreciated: Set up a little rewards system for the testers

After completion of this stress test, then you can fix the snapshot date and confidently launch the catapult network

2 Likes
#17

Really second what Jaguar said about the updates. If you wanted to give regular updates but didn’t want anyone to read them, you would take a strategy similar to what is being done currently.

I can hardly tell one update from the other anymore and scan them only, if I read them at all.

Perhaps another way would be to have each project team update in their own thread and more frequently. This would give faster turnaround time on community feedback and probably increase community involvement.3

8 Likes
#18

Hi all, Just circling back on this. We chatted between teams (Migration, Brand and Foundation). New project team updates are rolling out this week. Here’s the latest one for Tech & Product.NEM Foundation Support Update - Technology and Product

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#19

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